Chapter 15 Section 6 Mining and Metallurgy Sites in the Shang and Zhou Dynasties

Ancient mining and metallurgy sites in my country have been found in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty sites in Linxi, Inner Mongolia, and Mayang, Hunan.More than 40 ancient roadways and furnace relics have been discovered in Linxi Dajing.Five ancient mine shafts were discovered in Jiuqu Bay, Mayang, Hunan, and many mining-related tools such as hammers, chisels, and mallets were unearthed.Copper casting sites have been found in and around Eastern Zhou sites in Houma, Shanxi, Xinzheng, Henan, Qufu, Shandong, Yixian, Hebei, Jiangling, Hubei, and Nanling, Anhui.It is worth noting the Tonglu Mountain in Daye, Hubei and the Tongling Ancient Mine Site in Ruichang, Jiangxi.

The Tonglushan site is located in the west of Daye County, Hubei Province. It is two kilometers long from north to south and one kilometer wide from east to west. Excavations were carried out in this area in 1973, and many ancient mines, mining tools and utensils were found.There are smelting sites near the ancient mine.The main remains here belong to the Spring and Autumn Period in the early stage, and the Warring States to Western Han Dynasty in the later period. Mining relics, copper mines, with vertical shafts, level alleys, blind shafts, inclined alleys and other facilities.In the mine, the wooden frame is used as support to ensure the safety of the operation when digging.

The main pillar at the bottom of the shaft is made of four vertical logs or square logs, which are connected with two flat square frames by mortise and tenon method to form a cubic frame.One side or both sides connected with the level lane are reserved as passage openings.The entire shaft is made of such square frames stacked on top of each other.Its diameter is between 1.1 and 1.3 meters.The wooden frame is also used as support in the lane.On the outer side of the drift frame and on the top beam, sticks or boards are used as the back and top boards to prevent the four-wall ore soil from collapsing and facilitate ventilation.The frame of the roadway is arranged horizontally along the direction of excavation.

Wooden troughs are generally laid in the shafts as drainage facilities.The seepage water under the mine is introduced into the water storage pit, and then lifted to the ground from the vertical shaft with a potter's wheel. In the mine, the mining tools unearthed were all bronze in the early stage, such as copper axes, copper adzes, wooden shovels, mallets, boat-shaped wooden buckets, wooden ladles, bamboo baskets, ropes and other utensils; in the late period, iron axes, Drill, rake, hoe, etc. Near the mine, several furnaces from the Spring and Autumn Period were found.About 400,000 tons of slag are accumulated on the surface of the mining area.After testing, the copper content in the slag is very low, with an average of 0.7%.It shows that copper smelting technology has reached a certain level at that time.

From 1988 to 1991, a large-scale copper mine site in the Shang and Zhou Dynasties was excavated in Tongling, Ruichang, Jiangxi.This is the earliest copper mining and smelting site discovered in my country.Mining began in the middle of the Shang Dynasty and continued until the early Warring States period. The mining area of ​​the ruins covers an area of ​​1,800 square meters, and the smelting area covers an area of ​​600 square meters. 102 ancient mine shafts, 18 roadways, two smelting furnaces, seven mining pits, and a batch of mining tools and living utensils were found. In the Shang Dynasty, the combined mining methods of vertical shafts, level roads, and pit mining were adopted.Most of the shafts adopt wooden support structure.There are flat wooden boards and small wooden sticks on the well wall, and the well body is assembled with mortise and tenon joints and inner-mode square frame excavation frames.Most wells are below eight meters deep.There is a semi-crypt-style inclined alley in the ruins that is eye-catching.The inclined roadway is the approach road from the open-pit mining to the underground roadway mining.This is the first mining method discovered.This discovery gives us a more comprehensive understanding of how ancient miners mined ore from the surface to the depths of the formation.

Most of the unearthed objects are tools and living utensils for mining, lifting, drainage, mineral processing, loading, and lighting at that time.Among them, the wooden potter's wheel is the earliest existing potter's wheel in my country.It shows that my country used wooden machinery for mining production in the Shang Dynasty.The bronze arc-edged axe-shaped ax used in the opening has a unique shape and is rarely seen in the country.The pottery girdle has a diameter of 43 centimeters and a height of 36 centimeters. It is so large that it is rare in southern archaeology.In particular, the Li-style Ge unearthed from the bottom of Shaft No. 11 is dated to the mid-Shang Dynasty (about 15th-14th century BC).

Bamboo sticks used for lighting, with burning charcoal traces, are a kind of "bamboo candle", which should be the prototype of "fire candle". The discovery of the Tongling smelting site provides new information for the archaeological and metallurgical history of our country.It fills the blank of mining and metallurgy archeology in Shang Dynasty in my country, and is new evidence for the study of mining and metallurgy in the Bronze Age.